Arizona Crime Rates Lower Than National Average

A ranking of cities based on crime rates by The National Council for Home Safety and Security (NCHSS) puts Arizona's metro areas above the the national average, or safer than average. Arizona's safest city by their measure: Florence. Th least safe is Flagstaff.

For the state overall, the violent crime rate is 2.97 incidents per 1,000 people, below the national rate of 3.47. Arizona’s property crime rate is also below the national average. Amanda Palumbo is a researcher for alarms.org, the trade organization that gathers data on home safety and neighborhoods.

"It may give you a little bit of peace of mind when you look at those statistics and you think, oh, we're below the average, but, you still can't let your guard down because crime does happen everywhere. It happens in every community across the nation," she said.

The study was completed primarily to highlight the cities that have had the least amount of violent and non-violent crimes per population. Data was pulled from the FBI's most recent crime report on all U.S. cities and also something called the "police adequacy rating," a measure of whether or not a community's law enforcement has adequate staff for its population.